If anybody can come to this restaurant, it won't be a great restaurant, so we have to exclude those people.
How many future web designers cut their teeth making terrible Geocities websites? Just because something is terrible doesn't mean you didn't learn something.
The forest would be pretty quiet if only the best birds sang.
Your second argument in favor of Geocities is that future brilliant web designers may use it? Ok they might, but if Geocities didn't exist they'd use something else. And I'd argue they'd learn faster and better habits by learning with some other tool.
If you were a librarian, would you only make the top 100 novels available? Why circulate books that aren't the best?
What do you think high prices do?
Don't visit the neocities domain, and your problem is still solved.
People can make websites themselves elsewhere.
It seems true to me that it is actually more difficult and expensive to put up a simple amateur static arbitrary page of HTML in 2013 than it was in 1999. Even ignoring idealism and nostalgia aside, there is clearly an unfilled niche here.
I don't understand your objection to this service.
Of course geocities did not force you to obey to strict rules in your design, but many of us are programmers, and we have this particular tendency to try stick to guidelines even when not needed :), so I'd say, it was not Geocities responsability, but it's user's and a power user will never try to code in a messy way, but instead will try to inform himself day after day on best practices, standars, and reflect this in his code.
But here came the power of Geocities! It helped you at that stage where you were not yet a pro, perhaps you dreamt of becoming one, but at that moment you just needed the enthusiasm boost of being able to create SOMETHING YOURS, UNIQUE, A REAL SIGN OF YOURSELF and being able for the first time ever in human history to share it instantly WITH THE WHOLE(connected)WORLD! I remember this giving chills to me! :) And yet you could learn more from it! Compare this with being forced to obey to strict standards and guidelines right from the beginning.. of your learning experience ["hey avoid table, it's devil" when you are happy you finally managed to share your vinil collection (and mp3z? :) ) of your fav bands with the entire world for the first time in your (teen) life!]
We all now how much important is REWARD while learning new technologies at those early stages! Geocities, and also similar sites, were the fuel to start your engine and get to your first MULTIUSER "APP"(kind of) REWARD! what is the value of that? :)
Well, in my book, that's a recipe for great content.
The reason being that's what a platform like Geocities enables; garbage. It empowers people who are willing to put in basically no effort to make a static page with no scripting. That's not a recipe for amazing content, that's a recipe for bottom barrel content.
Really, any platform that enables everybody to contribute anything they want is going to sink to the lowest common denominator. The platform needs a built in way to highlight the best of it to have any worth whatsoever. Most Twitter feeds are unreadable garbage, the reason the platform is a success though is that it has built in ways to find, discover and follow the very best it has to offer.
It's also got a very narrow use case that happens to coincide very well with the skills of comedians and comedy writers. Geocities' narrow use case only coincides with the skills and talents of artists, and they already have Deviantart and their own gallery websites. There's no compelling reason for them to use Geocities/Neocities as their platform.
Best of luck but I'm skeptical this is going to ultimately be worthwhile.